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There was recently this article about Linus Torvalds' issues with rustfmt, which prompted others to voice their agreement with his sentiment online.

Yesterday someone pointed out how rustfmt is effectively unmaintained with basically no activity on the repository for months.

The contributors graph shows a similar story - there is essentially no development happening on rustfmt, it seems.

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[-] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 points 6 days ago

Is this a typo? What do you mean by KDE formatting?

[-] ulterno@programming.dev 5 points 6 days ago

I mean the clang-format in KDE code.
I work with it, I don't like it, but I like KDE, so I put up with the formatting that I don't like.

[-] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 1 points 6 days ago

Ahh, I see. Well okay, you don't have to like it. But that is not the problem of the default configuration, but the problem of those who accept it as the formatting in the project. You don't like what the KDE code formatting project does, and that's the issue. Working in teams it will obviously happen at some point that you don't like what the team accepted as formatting. This is not a specific issue with KDE or rustfmt.

BTW, wouldn't it work to have your personal rustfmt configuration that you like and work with and when you are done and want to git push, it would automatically reformat with rustfmt using the teams formatting? I personally don't work in teams, so no idea if this is a viable option to do if you really dislike what they use.

[-] ulterno@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago

I considered that (talking about clang-format here, not rustfmt), but there are cases where some files are formatted while others are not, such that, you can't go around formatting the whole project to your liking and then expect it to return to the same, once you go back to the project's configuration, for committing.

Here, the difference between clang-format and rustfmt comes up, because unlike clang-format, which has the required configurations, rustfmt does not have the configuration I require. The little part that is there, has not been fully implemented and a lot of the configuration hasn't even been defined.
Meaning that even if I were to put the time into contributing to rustfmt, I will soon reach a point where I will have to be setting up groundwork. That's where I will fail, because I am too new to Rust to be able to define formatting for undecided conditions, many of which I don't even know about yet.

this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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